Emergent Misbehavior

I am goingto make this breif; I typed a gorgeous 3 pager and then accidentally deleted it.

I have recently identified what I think to be a disturbing pattern in the behavior of the Right Wing of the GOP. Please understand that I am not identifying the GOP as "the Right Wing", because the truth is that this is not the case. Once upon a time they word lead primarily by centrists who were evry good at finding compromises with the center-left leadership of the Democratic Party. After the conservative hardliners took control of the Republican leadership in the mid-90's though, there was an end of it. As I have noted previously (thanks to mum, it was her phrasing) we are no longer talkign about a difference of opinions characterized by, "I'm right and you're wrong and we can talk it out." Now we are quite firmly in the grip of, "I'm right and you're evil and that's an end of it because we will not negotiate with evil."

The pattern I have identified is something that I have dimly, subconciously aware of for years but which only recently came into my immediate awareness in the last year or so and which I have only felt able to properly express since the GOP rebuttal of Obama's healthcare address to the joint congress on September 9th, 2009.

My conciousness of this was first sparked by a British film, In The Loop by Armando Iannucci. In this film, a US official does something that is greatly disturbing. He instructs an underling to run through the available data and find those things which support a particular administrative assertion which in turn is used to justify a particular administrative action. Why is this such an alarming thing?

Reason commands us to observe the data and to follow it, logically, to the conclusion which the data supports. What this fictional official (and I am sad to say this is a photo-perfect characterization of the conservative of the last decade or so) is the exact opposite. He wants information to be produced which supports what he has already decided. Let me be clear, this is not case of making an assertion and then testing it against the objective data; rather it merely seeking to justify an assertion after the fact. That screaming and weeping you here is the entirety of the dead philosophers, logicians, historians and scientists of Western civilization.

Let me give some extracts of mine from a recent thread on Pete's forum:

...This whole incident is sordid and a perfect example of the power of truthiness. Does it matter what the actual facts are when there are people out there ready to believe whatever seems most agreeable to them? Here is an interesting fact: human beings have a habit of assuming the intelligence and integrity of any person who says things they themselves say. The have a habit of assuming the worst in the case of any sort of cognitive dissonance...

And then a little farther down:

...Let me draw a little wisdom from someone who isn't a doctor, but does play one on TV(sometimes); "A diagnosis that doesn't diagnose anything isn't a diagnosis." By the same token, an explanation which does no bonafide explanatory work is not an explanation and, building along this logical progress, any solution which does not actually solve the problem is in no way at all a solution.
So, once again and rephrased, how much time should we commit to nonsolutions, and why...

...The president (and those of us who support him on this issue) are more than willing to entertain and even endorse a multitude of conservative ideas, not because it is good politics but because the ideas themselves are sound.
However, we need to make it understood and to that end I will repeat myself again, "The validity of any one propsition does not in any way validate other propositions from the same source. Nor does said validity invalidate any proposition from an opposing source, purely on the basis of those sources..."

...let me once again reiterate that this issue is not a binary equation, despite the desperate efforts of certain persons to frame it as such; neither is the demonstrated pattern of post-1994 right wing hard ballers of fitting fact to fancy a legitimate method of winning an argument. This gist of any such "method" winds up reducing to, "There are select facts which, exluding other facts, support my assertion and therefore whatever is said by anyone disagreeing with my assertion is necesarily false." Considering that this is the same "logic" employed by these conservative lawmakers' notorious "Real American" constituants, I suppose we should not be suprised...

Keeping all of this mind, let me draw your attention back to the GOP rebuttal of the president's address, as delivered by Representative Charles Boustany. What a damningly obvious proof of my claim. Knowing full well that these people recieved advance copies of the speech, that they are all well educated, that they must be aware of the public's ability and demonstrated willingness to fact-check and that they had to be paying attention as Obama was delivering the address one is left wondering, slack-jawed, at the fact that the first salient point made in the rebuttal was to state plainly that Obama hadn't shown any willingness to budge on what we are calling "the public option" less than ten minutes after he stated exactly that!

Words fail. I am left having to decide if the right wing leaderhsip of the GOP is insane, idiotic or simply so contemptuous of the American people that they are convinced they can ignore reality altogether when it fails to conform to their rhetoric.